This User Longs for User Generated Internet

I’ve written before about Riot Grrrl culture being a big influence on the way I think about and relate to the internet. Riot Grrrl and the World Wide Web happened around the same moment in the 1990s when DIY self-publishing was big in the Zeitgeist with zine culture and desktop/hypermedia publishing. Decades later, onchain technologies, as an evolution of open internet ideals, have provided even more democratized and decentralized tools for DIY production,¹ making creation, reproduction, and distribution even more accessible and permissionless. The Do-It-Yourself ethic in Riot Grrrl and WWW is what draws me to them. This is why the tagline for my first blockchain project, Riot Goools, is “Just some morose rebel goools looking to start some ghoul bands and to print some zines.”

chatting about websites and zines on Farcaster
When I was learning solidity basics and deploying random experiments on testnets, it reminded me of when I was little, printing dumb pictures with my home printer to emulate the zines I saw some older girls making or copying the HTML source of my favorite web pages to make a silly hover effect. Since then, I've gone on the make more elaborate zines and websites but the goal has remained the same: I want to put what’s in my head into a form that anyone can access and experience. And I want to do it myself without having to ask for permission.

Another way to think about DIY is User Generated Content. The UGC term is muddied today because it has become more associated with advertising where companies and brands leverage online user content for promotional purposes. This is almost a total inversion of its original meaning in relation to the internet as the stuff made by independent, often amateur, people – handmade websites, blogs, memes, etc.² – before advertisers realized they could exploit that free labor to move product. Back when people still blogged for the fun of it; when the internet felt more like a collaborative effort, a space to add, remix, and expand.² A "gift economy" with filesharing, free and open source software, and open collaboration.

The Viral Public License that Milady Maker uses is something I took interest in to make my own Milady inspired project, Very Internet Person. “The VPL's sole restriction is its own viral continuity, allowing it to effectively and permanently infect any work it touches with absolute permissiveness.” This permissiveness is a permissionless invitation to copy, add, remix, and expand. In other words, it invites users to log on to make things and have fun online.

With VIP, I wanted to contribute my voice to the dialog about the New Internet, Network Spirituality, etc. that Milady is also a part of. To add, remix, and expand. I want VIP to encourage new forks to explore these topics. VIP isn’t a brand or a business but a description of the type of work I like to make and the people I like to connect with. I'm most interested in making things that encourage or maybe even inspire people to create their own internet content. To do it themselves. The work I make is just my own continuing exploration as a user/participant contributing little modifications to an open source.

users mutate and propagate memes like "Born to Die/World is a Fuck"

Shortly after I made Riot Goools on the Fantom network in 2021, I followed it up with a small gift collection called Goool Bands. Since Riot Goools was inspired by Riot Grrrl culture, I wanted to continue the theme and so this was a series of unique pixel logos of imaginary band names that I gifted to collectors of my work. They were black pixel line drawings on different “printer paper” colors like the cheap xeroxed band posters you might see taped, stapled, or pasted on a lamppost or on a wall on the street. This collection of drawings was a tribute to late nights at Kinkos, drawing in sharpies, inhaling toner fumes, thinking about new songs. A love letter to just making things and doing it yourself.

some Goool Band posters

Today, artificial intelligence is reshaping the internet in new ways, with search results polluted by AI gibberish to AI browsers that “browse for you.” Although some call the “dead internet theory” a conspiracy theory, much of it seems to be more true and obvious as the internet gets more enmeshed with AI content. Many AI internet projects seem focused on taming a messy web by providing a mediated, more efficient, experience of information. While that can be useful in many cases, I can’t help but feel like it could potentially be a layer that obscures or flattens the most beautiful and unexpected parts of the web.

For me, the most compelling thing about the internet has always been the human parts of it – a tool that amplifies human qualities, messiness and all. Something like Napster enabled a whole new way to find and distribute music and may even have created totally new sounds and genres because, suddenly, musicians, professional and amateur, could discover and be influenced by work that was beyond reach or even considered lost to time. To find things on Napster, you still had to manually search – most of the time without even knowing what you were looking for and finding surprises along the way. These days, algorithms aim to give you/tell you what you want and you have to trust that the obscured parts are obscured for your benefit. Look how perfectly fitting the recommendations are, why would you need to do anything yourself?

DIY eschews the glossy pre-fabricated, pre-packaged world and embraces human imperfections as human ingenuity. And Luckily we also have more tools than ever to self-publish now, some even with AI assistance. And if we are going to train AI with the internet, maybe it is in our best interest to keep making things and filling the internet with as much human ingenuity as we can for it to model on. Then maybe we won't end up with a dead internet or an AGI that hates and wants to end us.³

I love the internet. I wish it wasn’t turning my brain into sludge. I feel like a bot sometimes with all these algorithms. I hope our AGI cyberlord will be kind to us and let us keep uploading silly websites and posting dumb memes in its presence. For now, I’ll keep celebrating the existence of human internet by uploading my imperfect human content and having fun while I still can.

I think I’ll make a zine.

Very Internet Printout: Born to Online

Mint
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332 Minted

I've deployed a new Zora collection called Very Internet Printout, sort of a quasi-reprise of Goool Bands. It will be focused on very internet things – meme remixes, texts, and other graphic exercises.⁴ There's no schedule, just a fun side project to add to whenever. It's free (plus fees) to anyone that wants to collect any of the pages (right-click save if you don't need an onchain copy.) I'll also direct drop the pages to the VIPs who signed up on the form.